Snow White and the Seven Samurai

by Tom Holt

  ‘About time you started pulling your weight around here,’ Snow White continued, and her seams creaked disturbingly as she folded her arms across her hitherto unsuspected chest. ‘Right then, you lot, bring me the head of the wicked queen. Oh, come on,’ she added, as the samurai stared at her in bewilderment, ‘you’re trained professional killers, and it’s not as if I’d asked you to do anything difficult. Or do you want a diagram with a dotted line marked “cut here”?’

  ‘Um,’ said Mr Miroku, quickly chewing up an inconvenient mouthful of orange, ‘I’m not quite sure that I understood you correctly. You want us to, er, murder someone.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘A defenceless woman.’

  ‘You could say that, I suppose.’

  ‘A defenceless woman who’s also our rightful queen-empress.’

  ‘That’s her. Look, if it’s the beheading bit that’s bothering you, I’ll settle for a quick strangling and a duly notarised copy of the death certificate, I’m not fussy about tradition and stuff like that. Just so long as she’s dead, I couldn’t care less.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Mr Akira interrupted, looking pointedly at a mark on the wall an inch or so above Snow White’s head, ‘but are we supposed to do stuff like that? I thought our job was more along the lines of protecting the weak and oppressed and generally going around being helpful and nice.’

  Snow White sniggered unkindly. ‘Get real,’ she said, ‘you’re samurai. In case nobody told you when you joined up, that means you’re feudal warriors, duty bound to kill your overlord’s enemies without question or hesitation. Or did you think the bloody great big swords were in case you were ever called on to open a six-foot long envelope?’

  Mr Suzuki closed his eyes, opened them again and licked his lips, which had become unusually dry. ‘I think the point that my young colleague is trying to make is that we’re only supposed to use our formidable fighting skills in a noble and worthy cause. Contract killing, on the other hand—’

  ‘You,’ Snow White growled, ‘shut up. Now, all of you,’ she added, ‘get your armour on and get moving, or I’ll chop you into bits and feed you to the goldfish. All right? Good.’

  When she’d gone, the samurai gazed at each other with the same befuddled look as Moses might have worn on discovering that he’d made a mistake in reading what it said on the tablets and that he was now committed to leading his people forth into the Threatened Land.

  ‘There’s something funny going on,’ Mr Hiroshige said at last. ‘But I’m blowed if I know what it is.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Mr Akira. ‘We haven’t got a goldfish.’

  There was a bleak silence; then Mr Suzuki shrugged his shoulders. ‘Maybe it’s some kind of loyalty test,’ he said. ‘After all, the sages tell us that in order to appreciate the ambivalent nature of the Way—’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ the others chorused.

  Chapter 7

  The knight introduced himself as Sir Agravaunt.

  He explained that he’d been going about his business in a quiet, inoffensive way, hanging out his washing between two convenient trees in a shady, peaceful part of the forest.

  ‘Washing?’ Sis queried.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Sir Agravaunt. ‘And then this horrid great big dragon—’

  ‘Doesn’t it rust?’

  Sir Agravaunt looked at her oddly. ‘How do you mean?’ he said.

  ‘Your, um, washing,’ Sis replied, trying not to stare at the knight’s shining armour. ‘Wouldn’t you be better off with a can of oil or metal polish?’

  The knight’s forehead corrugated, then relaxed. ‘Not that sort of washing, silly,’ he said. ‘Sheets and pillowcases and table napkins and things. Anyway, along comes this tiresome dragon—’

  ‘You do your own laundry?’ Sis interrupted.

  ‘Well, of course I do. Doesn’t everyone?’

  Sis, who had the same degree of passive understanding of how a washing machine worked as she had of the operation of the solar system, shrugged and said, ‘I suppose so. But I thought you people had — well, servants and things.’

  The knight shook his head. ‘Not likely,’ he said. ‘Domestic service is a barbaric and outmoded institution, equally degrading for both servant and master. And besides,’ he added ruefully, ‘they’d want to be paid.’

  Sis caught sight of a patch crudely spot-welded onto the left elbow of his armour and a run in a chain-mail stocking loosely botched up with fusewire, and nodded tactfully. ‘Quite right,’ she said. ‘You’re very, um, enlightened. For a knight, I mean.’

  Once again the knight shot her a curious look. ‘You haven’t met many knights, have you?’ he said.

  ‘Well, no, actually,’ Sis admitted. ‘Not actually met them, face to face. Er, face to visor. Whatever. I’ve read about them, of course,’ she added quickly. ‘You know, the knights of the round table, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Round table,’ Sir Agravaunt repeated, obviously mystified. ‘Can’t say that rings a bell. Are you thinking of Sir Mordevain, by any chance? He’s got a circular Swedish pine table in his kitchen-dinette. And,’ he added with a hint of venom, ‘a bead curtain over the doorway, and a fur-fabric toilet-roll holder shaped like a cat in his downstairs loo. It only goes to show, there’s absolutely no accounting for taste.’

  The wicked queen coughed meaningfully. ‘I don’t want to hurry you,’ she said, ‘but there are a few things we ought to be doing. You know, setting the world to rights, darning the fabric of the space/time continuum.’

  The knight, whose eyes had momentarily lit up at the words darning and fabric, sniffed disdainfully. ‘Huh,’ he said. ‘Girl talk. I’ll leave you to it. Thanks anyway, for saving me from the dragon and so forth.’

  As he clanked away into the shadows of the greenwood, Sis scratched her head. ‘That knight,’ she said.

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘Are they — well, all like that?’

  ‘Not really,’ the queen replied. ‘Or at least, they weren’t. Knights were bold, fearless, courteous, a little bit on the psychotic side but nothing that hiding from them in a deep cellar under a pile of old sacks couldn’t cope with. I think the word I’m looking for is manly.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘On the other hand,’ the queen went on, ‘ever since I can remember, knights have been exactly like that one we just met, if not more so. You want your living room redesigned or your wardrobe co-ordinated, you send for a knight. I wouldn’t mind,’ she went on bitterly, ‘if it was one followed by the other, but it isn’t. It’s simultaneous, and that’s what really makes me want to spit.’

  Sis tried to make sense of it, but it was like trying to make one picture out of pieces from four different jigsaw puzzles. ‘Please explain,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll try. You see, there’s the way it ought to be, which is how it was before you crashed — sorry, before the system went down. All right, so far?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Good. There’s also the way it is now, as a direct result of the system going down. If you care to think of it geometrically, let’s say everything’s at an angle of roughly sixty degrees to how it should be. Hence, for example, all that business with the three little pigs. I take it you know the orthodox version.’

  Sis considered. ‘Let’s see. Pigs build house, wolf blows house down, pigs start again, build another one. Is that the one you mean?’

  The queen nodded. ‘And sure enough,’ she said, ‘the three little pigs built a house, and it did get blown down. Or rather up. The difference is that it didn’t get blown up by the wolf, they did it themselves. Same approximate net result, different chain of events leading up to it; that’s what I meant by an angle of sixty degrees. It’s confusing and a horrid mess, but at least it ends up the same way. The narrative patterns are bent but not broken. It’s the third one that’s worrying me.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘The third way is where things actually get swapped round with their opposite numbers
, like the knight being saved from the dragon by the damsel. Now that’s not just a phase modulation shift in the epic sine-curve, that’s somebody deliberately mucking things about. And that’s why I’m worried.’

  ‘Oh,’ Sis said. ‘Have you any idea who it might be?’

  ‘Oh yes. In fact, I’m morally certain I know exactly who it is. You see, I have this bad feeling that you and I together are in grave danger of becoming Snow White.’

  Sis didn’t know how to react to that. Her first reaction was to make a face and feign nausea; then it struck her that — ‘If we’re Snow White,’ she said, ‘who’s the wick— I mean, who’s being you?’

  The queen grinned painfully. ‘Go figure,’ she said.

  ‘Snow White? Snow White’s turning into you?’

  ‘Logical, to the point of dreary inevitability. And the problem is, if she’s me, and she can somehow get the system working again—’

  Sis swallowed hard. ‘You mean she’ll be out to get us?’

  ‘Of course. It’s what I’d be doing. What I probably am doing,’ she added, clenching her fists in frustration, ‘assuming I’m right, of course, and we are changing places. The nasty bit is that she’d be in complete control of the Mirrors core, which means she’d be able to change the rules. Like,’ she added, shaking her head sadly, ‘turning everything upside down.’

  ‘You mean she’s already started? Like with the knight and the dragon stuff.’

  ‘You’ve got it,’ sighed the queen. ‘And that’s where everything happening at once comes into the picture. That’s what’s complicating it so horribly, you see. It’d be bad enough if the three versions happened one after the other, but the wretched truth is that they’re all happening at the same time.’ Sis was really at a loss to know how to deal with that.

  Nobody could accuse her of panicking, of falling to bits as soon as the going got weird; so far, she reckoned she’d coped admirably, largely by telling herself it was all one of those strange dreams soap-opera writers fall back on when they need to bring back to life someone who’s been dead for the last hundred episodes. But even they’d never gone this far.

  ‘Explain,’ she said.

  The wicked queen looked at her, then giggled. ‘You should have seen your face when you said that,’ she said. ‘It was as if that bloke in Alien had had a bunch of primroses jump out of his tummy instead of the little wriggly treen. I know it sounds goofy,’ she went on, with a sigh. ‘Unfortunately, that’s how things work around here. Your friend Sir Whatsisface, the knight; somewhere or other there’s a story with him in it, right? Otherwise he wouldn’t be here, he’d be somewhere else, probably working in a library or a fabric shop. In that story, you can bet your life that he’s the one who kills the dragon, and the damsel in distress is the one who gets saved. Seem reasonable to you?’

  Sis nodded. ‘That’s the way I’d expect it to be,’ she said. ‘Otherwise,’ she added, ‘why’d he be a knight in the first place?’

  ‘Exactly. You’re getting the hang of it now. What he is determines who he is. I must remember that,’ the queen added, ‘it’s very good. Now, then. That story must be somewhere — in a book or a film or a cartoon strip, or even just inside the heads of everyone who’s ever heard it, right?’

  ‘Sure. I mean, why not?’

  ‘So far, so good. Now think what happens when the system goes down and everything’s thrown out of synch. The stories are all still there, but somehow some of the people have got into the wrong stories. Like what happened back there, with the three little pigs somehow winding up in the story of the three bears. That’s pretty bad — a bit like a plumber suddenly finding himself doing brain surgery while the surgeon’s been whisked away and wakes up to discover he’s turned into an airline pilot. Get the picture?’

  ‘In a sense.’

  ‘Okay. Now think about someone deliberately screwing up the stories. The original story’s still there, in a book or between someone’s ears. Then there’s the sixty-degrees-skewed version; well, we know that’s running, because we’re in it. Finally there’s the deliberate fuck-ups, which seem to be precisely targeted to cause as much grief as possible. And they’re all going on at the same time. If you want proof, ask someone. You’ll find that their long-term memory’s either completely gone or they’re living with an entirely different set of memories from the ones they had this time last week. Fun, isn’t it?’

  Sis made one last effort to understand what she’d heard; but it was a lot to ask, the equivalent of expecting a one-armed man to empty the Pacific into the Atlantic using a tablespoon. ‘So what do we do?’ she asked.

  ‘If you say that once more, I’m going to tie you to a tree and leave you there. For the last time, I don’t know. Where you get this idea that I’m some sort of extra-brainy tactician from I don’t know. What sort of bedtime stories did your mother tell you, for pity’s sake?’

  ‘But…’ But the wicked queen always knows what to do, Sis nearly said; or at least, she always has a plan. Then it occurred to her that she already knew what the answer would be. ‘Oh, all right then,’ she said. ‘How’d it be if we just stay where we are and wait for something to happen?’

  ‘What a splendid…’ The queen broke off, smiled, turned through forty-five degrees and pointed. She didn’t say anything, because there was no need.

  Sis followed the line of her finger, and saw a tall, fat man with a long white beard, dressed in what looked like a red towelling-robe with furry white trim, running very fast out of a fuzzy patch of undergrowth. Since she was not entirely without compassion, she had filled her lungs with a view to yelling, ‘Look out,’ but before she could do so, the fat man ran straight into a tree and fell over. Sis started to move towards him, but the queen grabbed her arm; and a moment later, a milk-white unicorn with a silver horn appeared from the same clump of shrubbery that had produced the fat man. It caught sight of him, whinnied savagely, lowered its horn and charged; at which point the fat man woke up, saw the unicorn heading towards him, made a shrill yelping noise and shinned up the tree with a degree of skill and dexterity that made Sis want to clap her hands and shout ‘Bravo!’ The unicorn made a couple of futile attempts to climb the tree after him, then dropped back on to four hooves and squatted down on its haunches, breathing heavily through its nose.

  Smiling, the queen folded her arms and sat down on a boulder. ‘About time, too,’ she said.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Eugene said. ‘We aren’t going to hurt you.’

  Julian poked his head above the barricade of straw bales and nodded. ‘Too right you aren’t,’ he replied. ‘Not through any lack of effort on your part, but simply because I’m up here, you’re down there and I’ve got the ladder. Now bugger off before I start dropping things on your heads.’

  He had, his brothers had to concede, got a point there. It was their fault for letting him get such a good head start on them; by the time they’d tracked him down to Old Macdonald’s barn, he’d had plenty of time to build himself an impromptu fortification out of straw bales.

  ‘You’ve got five minutes,’ Desmond said. ‘Then we’re coming in after you. Understood?’

  ‘It’s for your own good,’ Eugene added.

  ‘Yeah. And when we’ve finished with you, you’ll wish you’d never been born.’

  In his straw castle, Julian did his best to stay calm. Bluster, he assured himself. Huffing and puffing. Without the ladder, there was no way they could scramble up the sides of the hayrick. After all, he was the brains of the family, always had been, ever since they were piglets together…

  Why are they doing this?

  ‘Four minutes,’ Desmond called out. ‘Say your prayers, little brother, ‘cos we’re gonna get you.’

  Piglets together… Ever since he could remember it had just been the three of them, pitting their plump little bodies and their agile wits against the lean, cold, mercifully stupid big bad wolf. And now, apparently, the wolf was dead and gone, all their troubles were over… And h
is brothers were laying siege to him as he cowered in a house of straw, wheedling and threatening him in turns while they prowled up and down — Hang on. Just a cotton-picking minute. Play back the edited highlights of that train of thought.

  · Huffing and puffing

  · House of straw

  · Three little pigs

  ‘You think just because we can’t get up there, you’re safe,’ Desmond went on. ‘Well you’re wrong, little brother, you couldn’t be wronger. ‘Cos—’

  ‘Shouldn’t that be “more wrong”?’

  ‘Quiet, Eugene. ‘Cos if you aren’t out of there in three minutes, we’re gonna set fire to the straw and burn you out. You copy?’

  ‘Desmond—’

  ‘Shut up, ‘Gene, I know what I’m doing. Three minutes, sucker, and then it’s roast pork. You got that?’

  ‘Desmond—’

  ‘I said shut it, little brother. This is no time to get sentimental. I mean yes, you’ve got to admire his tenacity. The pig’s got balls. And quite soon they’re gonna be served in batter with sweet and sour sauce. Now then, where’s those matches?’

  Extraordinary, Julian thought, with a shudder that started just behind his ears and kept going right down to the last twist of his tail. They’re not just as bad as the damn wolf, they’re worse. What is going on here? ‘Look, you two,’ he shouted back, trying to keep his voice steady, ‘what’s got into you? You’re acting crazy, both of you. Just stop and listen to yourselves.’

  ‘Two minutes, loser. You got any last requests? Favourite recipes?’

  They won’t actually do it. It’s just bluff and bluster. Huffing and puffing — He heard the rasp of a match, then a crackle. Instinctively he twitched his wide, sensitive nose and smelt smoke. Panic hit him, like a very large truck hitting a very small hedgehog.

  ‘Desmond, what do you think you’re…?’ Eugene broke off in a fit of harsh coughing, as ominous blue wisps started to curl round the lip of the straw-bale barricade. Julian had heard somewhere that once straw starts burning, there’s next to nothing that can stop it; the flame leaps up inside the hollow stalk, finding inside it the oxygen it needs for a really keen burn, and even a sudden heavy downpour simply can’t saturate the straw fast enough to stop it flaring up and blazing. His trotters shaking uncontrollably, he tried to pig-handle the ladder over his head and set it down against the already smoking parapet; but the shakes were too bad, he let go — ‘For God’s sake, Julian, mind what you’re doing. You nearly brained me!’